Meet the VW that’s built like a Bentley

TWO decades ago a very clever engineer called Ferdinand Piech had a brainwave.

This member of the Porsche family was in charge at Volkswagen and cooked up the idea of platform sharing. In other words, the same car base could be used for many different models.

It wasn’t a new idea but Piech turned it into an art form. The Golf platform, for example, was used for the Beetle and on numerous other cars around the group, including the Audi A3, Skoda Octavia and Seat Leon.

But no platform demonstrates Piech’s genius better than the Mlbevo platform that’s the basis for the Touareg SUV.

This is also used for the Porsche Cayenne, Audi Q7, Bentley Bentayga and the new Lamborghini Urus. Just think of the economies of scale: the same infrastructure used on everything from a relatively affordable Volkswagen to a very unaffordable Lamborghini.

No Italian exotics today though as we’re testing the new thirdgeneration Touareg itself.

The new car is longer, wider and lower than the old one. Lower I VW Touareg R-line Tech 4x4

Price: £58,195

Engine: 3.0-litre V6 diesel, 286bhp

0-62mph: 6.2sec

Fuel consumption: 42.8mpg

don’t mind but wider and longer simply make the car more of a pain to park and thread through traffic. Mind you, it’s shorter than the Audi Q7 because it doesn’t have the option of a third row of seats. That does mean that rear seat passengers get a massive amount of space and that there’s a lot of luggage room.

It’s a handsome looking car, certainly much better looking

Williams Advanced Engineering is charging ahead. It’s teaming up with Unipart Manufacturing Group to form a new firm called Hyperbat which will produce batteries for future hybrid and electric vehicles from a multi-million pound factory in Coventry. Production at the site will start early next year with the first batteries going into the new Aston Martin Rapide E that’s mentioned below. Let’s hope that’s just the start of it and that the company will be able to add more jobs to the 90 created so far.